Time for a zero refugee policy? - *Read OP for mod warnings and threadbans - updated 11/5/24*

There'll be 180k refugees here by year end the government estimates. This will have no impact on housing according to some posters on here!

You'd hope these posters have their snouts in the refugee industry, if not there's no hope for them!

Read a lot of this thread. Can someone please explain how the refugee problem is responsible for our inability to have an environment to get building housing and the inability for our government to fix our health service (in fairness this one is less or not used anymore)

ireland's birth rate's have been decreasing since 2009.

from 2006 - 2016, there was an additional 200k houses built.

putting those 2 things together.....less demand and more supply you would think houses would be easily available

i would have adopted the OP's strategy (with some modifications) a few years ago

i wish we had stats on that.

do we?

i must of made a mistake, we were talking about population growth?

Actually, you should check your own stats.

Natural population growth in Ireland from 2009 through 2022 was 467,803. Mean household size throughout that time period was 2.75. The number of new dwellings required to support natural population growth throughout that time period was a little over 170K, translating to about 12.2K new homes per year.

I haven’t triangulated this requirement against the CSO stats for annual house/apartment completions, but I would be surprised if it didn’t average out at or above 12K per year. To use your own nomenclature, it seems a bit of a ‘fallacy’ to claim that migration plays no role in the acute housing shortage that currently pertains in Ireland..

Asylum seekers are unemployed because they are not legally entitled to work, so I'm not sure why you're including them.

As for "accepted" refugees, a lot of them go back to their country of origin within 6 months apparently, so they obviously never entered the jobs market. Regarding the remaining refugees, who opted to "settle" in the host country, I couldn't find anywhere saying they had any higher rates of unemployment than the local population?

If anything, the below link showing a briefing from the University of Oxford suggests the opposite is true and they have lower rates of unemployment at least in the UK, which should be relevant since its our closest neighbour.

Dunno if you trust amnesty international, but I looked for return rates using google and this was one of the links I had seen:

It says: "Over the past decade, just over 1 million refugees were resettled, compared to 3.9 million refugees who returned to their country."

Again, I've no idea how reliable these figures are, but I'm guessing they're not going to be totally wrong.

Not sure why you're singling out Nigerian and Congolese nationals in Ireland, as according to https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp11eoi/cp11eoi/lfnmfl/ there's a whole section titled "Higher employment for those with better English". Anyway that's splitting hairs, the majority of people once added to the country should be able to pay taxes in the country, thus contributing to the economy - if there are strange effects or outliers, then they should be addressed as strange effects or outliers, not as our immigration policy.

For example, if there is a correlation found that Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists are hugely detrimental to society, then we should have things in place that stop them affecting our society - nothing to do with immigration really, more of a 'law and order' and 'education' problem, coupled with criminal justice system requiring proper teeth (prison is a joke for majority of prisoners).

"Non-EU migrants moving to the UK seeking asylum have a higher unemployment rate and a lower employment rate than other non-EU migrants (Figure 5). For example, the unemployment rate in 2020 among non-EU born migrants who moved to the UK seeking asylum was 14%"

So refugees are less likely to be in employment

Was just missing the 'Irish emigrated too!' for a slam dunk.

Very good point on radio this morning. O'Gorman has been thrown under a bus by FFG in relation to housing refugees and asylum seekers.

Why would you give this massive job to a new TD and Minister in the small coalition partner? Aren't there plenty of FG TDs with ministerial experience who could take this role? The 2 Simons have feck all to do for example but both of them would point blank refuse it. FG need to own it. It appears he isn't getting much support from his coalition partners either. If Ryan had any cop on he would not allow this to happen. It reminds me of when Trickle Hogan handed the Irish Water superquango mess to Labour's Alan Kelly.

Put a FG TD in charge and let's see what happens.

Given the track record of some of the charities in this country - as very publicly documented in recent years - you might as well burn your money yourself as it has as much chance of getting to where it's needed that way.

The best thing you or anyone can do to help refugees now is to lobby your government TDs to put an end to the current free-for-all advocated for by the likes of O'Gorman above that has more and more arriving when we can't even support those already here - especially when many/most? of these latest arrivals are in fact economic migrants or chancers abusing the situation even more, and who are reducing still further the limited resources we actually have for those genuinely in need.

The overwhelming number of people who come to Ireland are "economic migrants" and "chancers", as are all of the Irish people who move abroad. This idea that moving to another country to make a better life for yourself is an aberration seems a peculiar one in right wing circles.

Aragh Fine Gael promised to end direct provision in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections. They also created the housing disaster and have been in power for 12 years. How was an inexperienced Green TD given this role? A normal company would not give a major project to a junior newbie.

Aren't his decisions implicitly approved by cabinet and the 2 clueless taoisigh? Where has Michael and Leo disagreed with his policy? Why havent they replaced him with someone more competent?

Let's be a bit adult about all this. None of the Greens should have this role.

FF TDs have Health, Housing and Finance and they are struggling in the first two bigtime. Time for FG TDs to step up. They just want portfolios that make them look good. Useless.

The likes of Doherty and Ring giving out about O'Gorman on the airwaves this weekend - oh **** off you cowardly gombeens. Zero honour in that. Just populist BS.

And I do not vote Green!